Could AI enslave humanity before it destroys it entirely?

Depending on how you count, we are in the midst of the second or third AI hype-bubble since the 1960s, but the absolute current state of the art in machine cognition is still just about being better than humans at playing chess or being about as good as human beings at analysing some medical scans. It was recently revealed that many thousands of humans were secretly hired to check recordings of people interacting with the ‘intelligent assistants’ on their iPhones or other such devices: much of what is trumpeted as ‘AI’ is still, in fact, dependent on invisible human labour in the digital sweatshop.

Given all this, and the plain threats the world faces from natural stupidity, how worried should we be about some future Skynet-like AI taking over the world and enslaving or destroying humanity? Well, some brilliant people are very worried indeed: they include the philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 book Super-intelligence popularised the modern version of the problem, and the physicist Max Tegmark, whose 2017 book Life 3.0 I highly recommend for an overview of the story so far.

The science writer Tom Chivers, in The AI Does Not Hate You, delivers a pleasantly journalistic if rather dishevelled account of how such personalities figured in the rise of an AI-focused internet community called the Rationalists. Are they just another millenarian movement of tech-inflected eschatology, or alternatively, as one sceptic says, a ‘sex cult’? Even if they are, we might need to take them seriously, as we should take seriously the possibility of a big asteroid hitting the Earth again: it might be unlikely, but the downside is an extinction-level event.

Not among the cultists is Stuart Russell, author of a seminal textbook on AI computing, whose own new book is a more nutritiously reasoned and orderly investigation.